History of Science Society

History of Science auf Deutsch

Mitchell Ash discusses the German-language societies in Europe.

As current president of the “Society for History of Sciences” (Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte), one of the two societies for history of science in Germany, I was honored to be asked to make a statement at a plenary session of the second conference of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), which was held in Crackow, Poland in September of 2006. The topic of the session was the role of national societies in the promotion of the history of science, and contributions came from the United States, Canada and Israel, as well as from several European countries. The following text is a revised version of my remarks on that occasion. Since I live and work in Vienna, I have allowed myself to add a few words about Austria and German-speaking Switzerland in order to complete a very brief overview of the situation in German-speaking Europe.
Neither of the two societies in Germany could be called a “national society” in the strict sense. By far the older is the “German Society for History of Medicine, Natural Sciences and Technology” (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik), or DGGMNT, which was founded by Karl Südhoff in 1901. The younger organisation is the“Society for History of Sciences” (Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte), or GWG, which was founded in 1965 by younger members of the DGGMNT dissatisfied with the leadership and direction of the older society.
Until very recently the two societies differed in three major respects:
(1) Intellectual scope. The DGGMNT encompasses the history of medicine, natural sciences, and technology. Though the work of its members has expanded to include recent trends in social and cultural studies of science, its continued focus on particular fields of knowledge is indicated by its organizational form, with a governing board of representatives from each of the three subject areas given in its name. In contrast, the GWG bases its work on the German concept of Wissenschaft, which refers to all scholarly disciplines, and therefore includes members who study the history of the social sciences and humanities – including theology and law – as well as the natural sciences, medicine and technology.
(2) Membership recruitment. The DGGMNT, with 532 individual and more than 100 institutional members as of September 2006, is by far the largest history of science society in German-speaking Europe. By contrast, membership in the smaller GWG stands at 178 members at present. Its wide-ranging interdisciplinary topical symposia are much smaller in size than those of the DGGMNT, in order to assure that each session is a plenary session, and are based entirely on invited presentations.
(3) Organ of publication. The DGGMNT had no journal of its own until recently. The journal Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte was founded in 1978 as the publication venue of the GWG, and publishes a selection of the contributions to the annual symposia of the GWG along with separate papers. All members of the GWG receive the journal as a benefit of membership. The DGGMNT is now moving to establish a similar relationship with the journal NTM.
The two societies usually meet separately, the DGGMNT in September and the GWG in May, but have recently agreed to meet jointly every three years, with the program to be decided by a common program committee. The first common meeting took place in September 2006 in Braunschweig; the topic was “Cultures of Science, the Sciences in Culture” (Kulturen der Wissenschaft, Wissenschaften in der Kultur). The conference format combined the approaches of the two societies, with parallel paper sessions and an invited symposium of plenary lectures. The outstanding attendance (over 200 participants and over 100 papers), the high quality of the papers, and the lively discussion suggests that such common conferences have a bright future.
The German organization that fulfils at least some of the functions of a “national society” is the Federal Republic of Germany’s National Committee in the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS). This body meets every four years in preparation for the congresses of the Union, and organized until recently the publication of research reports on scholarship in the history of science in Germany with the support of the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG).

There is no such national representative body in Austria, but there is a national society, the Austrian Society for History of Science (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte) founded in 1980. Helmuth Grössing, recently retired from the faculty of the University of Vienna, has been the Society’s president since its founding. The range of interests of the society’s membership is similar to that of the GWG, and it also has a journal that is furnished to members as part of their membership. There is no annual meeting; instead, members attend a series of about six or seven lectures per year held by the society. Further organizations for history of science in Austria include: the Commission for History of Mathematics, Medicine and Natural Science of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, host to the next meeting of the ESHS in Vienna; the “Vienna Circle Society,” devoted to the history of philosophy of science in cultural context; and the Ignaz Lieben Society, dedicated to advancing research on the history of the sciences in the territory of the former Habsburg Monarchy.
The established organization for history of science in German- and French-speaking Switzerland is the Swiss Society for History of Medicine and Natural Science (in German: Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medicine und Naturwissenschaften), which was founded in 1921. The society’s journal is Gesnerus, which also publishes a monograph series. Also based in Switzerland is the “Society for University History and History of Sciences” (Gesellschaft für Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte), founded in 1995. This group now has approximately 110 members from Switzerland, Germany, Austria and other countries. Like the GWG, this society’s work is based on the unified concept of Wissenschaft encompassing the entire range of systematic scholarship; in addition, it is committed to the unity of (higher) education and science.
Its conferences are therefore devoted to important topics in university history – most recently, financing higher education and universities in the public sphere. Conference proceedings are published in a series edited by the founder and president, professor Rainer Schwinges of the University of Bern.
This array of organizations – alongside a number of others devoted to single fields, such as the “Society for History and Theory of Biology” (Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie) – indicates both the sheer size of the history-of-science community and the multiplicity of its organizational structures in the German-speaking cultural region. Judging by publication output and intellectual intensity, scholarship in the history of science in German-speaking Europe is on a par with that of the English-speaking world in many respects. The language problem, though still in evidence, is far less serious than it may once have been. Many younger historians appear to have little difficulty in consulting literature or even publishing themselves in other languages, especially English. Unfortunately, the organizational splintering just described, and particularly the absence of a single society to which all or most scholars in the field might feel obliged to belong, has limited the international visibility of this scholarship to some extent. On the other hand, the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin has become the leading center for research in history of science world-wide, while keeping its activities largely separate from those of the organizations mentioned above.
Only once was it possible to make the size, the varied scope, and the wide-ranging interests of the German-speaking history of science community visible in one place. The “Historians’ of Science Day” (Wissenschaftshistorikertag) held in Berlin in 1996 attracted over 800 participants. Sadly, it has not been possible to repeat this event, nor did it lead to the establishment of a common organization for history of science in Germany, as its organizers may have hoped that it would. However, joint meetings among the societies, for example of the GWG with the ÖGW in Vienna in the spring and of the GUW and the GWG in the fall of 2005, respectively, as well as the above-mentioned joint conference of the DGGMNT and the GWG in 2006, indicate that forces for unity and common purpose may gradually be growing stronger than centrifugal ones.

– By Mitchell G. Ash, Vienna